Lady and gentlemen

For Peta Wilson, starring in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
is vindication for suffering as La Femme Nikita, writes Jim
Schembri.

When we finally get to it, Peta Wilson is so excited about her new film she
barely has a chance to draw breath.

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - or LXG, to give
the film its modishly abbreviated 21st-century zing - Wilson plays one of a team
of superheroes drawn from classic literature who fight evil on the eve of the
20th century.

As Mina, a vampiress recruited from Bram Stoker's Dracula, she joins forces
with Allan Quartermain (played by 72-year-old rug-wearing producer Sean
Connery), Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, the Invisible Man and Dr Jekyll to do
battle against a bad guy whose understanding of genetic engineering is about a
century ahead of the rest of the world's.

Beautifully designed and featuring some genuinely impressive effects
sequences that, for once, don't look like they fell off the end of an Avid
editing desk, director Stephen Norrington (Blade) creates an alternate world in
which such glaring anachronisms as machine-guns, high-powered cars and huge
submarines appear natural amid gas lanterns and cobblestone streets.

"Stephen Norrington is the missing link, he's the superhero that we can't see
who's all through the film," the shock-blonde, statuesque, Sydney-born Wilson
gushes. "I felt so safe with him. I wanted to do the best Mina I could for
him."

For Wilson, LXG represents a belated entry into a superhero
franchise, something denied her by the producers of the hit TV series La
Femme Nikita, which ran for five seasons and for which the 33 year old is
most well-known.

The $US90 million ($130 million) film was beset with production difficulties,
such as a flood in Prague that claimed $US7 million worth of sets, including,
ironically, Captain Nemo's submarine.

More noteworthy, though, was the widely reported battle between veteran
star/producer Sean Connery and newbie director Norrington. Far from trying to
hose down reports of frequent tiffs that often kept Connery in his trailer for
hours while Norrington set up complicated effects shots, Wilson confirms them
with spin-free frankness.

"Well, one's a meat eater, one's a vegan," she quips. "Sean Connery's been a
movie star longer than Australia's been a country. He's seen everything. Steve
Norrington's a new breed of film director. This guy is so talented, brilliant,
he has a genius mind. It was like there was 10 of him doing the movie. He was
involved in every single detail.

"I think it must have been difficult for Sean Connery to be working with a
big star in this movie, which was the CGI (computer-generated imagery). Forty
per cent of the film is special effects, and that must have been frustrating for
him to have to wait for those things - and it must have been frustrating for
Stephen to have to pacify him, because if the CGI didn't work, no matter how
great Connery was it wasn't going to work.

"And Prague is not exactly the Bahamas! It's a depressing place. The schedule
was long and hard and there was a lot of money on-screen as well as
off-screen."

Wilson recently gave birth to her first child, and motherhood provides her
with a neat analogy for the film's production trials. "You know, I think it's
like having a baby. There's always a bit of trouble bringing up a baby. There's
always tension, arguments."

Speaking of which, Wilson makes it very clear that she's still on speaking
terms with the people who made La Femme Nikita, even though she feels
she could have gotten a better deal from the show she devoted five years of her
career to.

Driven largely by her relentlessly chatty conversational style, this is what
takes up most of our interview before getting to LXG. She knows full
well the space Nikita takes up on her resume, and is keen to put it in
perspective.

It was a hard five years and taught her a lot about TV acting after having
spent six-and-a-half years in theatre doing, she says, everything from Tennessee
Williams to Shakespeare to Noel Coward.

She also learnt some hard lessons about the way Hollywood works.

Not expecting the show to go beyond a pilot, it went on for five seasons
(1997-2001), during which Wilson was offered a role in the first hugely
successful X-Men film. The producers, however, would not release her,
even briefly, from her Nikita contract unless she agreed to do more
years than she wanted to.

As Nikita became more successful around the world - including in
Russia, where Wilson was personally lauded by President Putin at a Russian Film
Festival dinner - she asked for "a piece of the pie". She didn't get it.

So she quit. Fans thought the show had been cancelled, and as there were
loose ends left dangling and fans who set up "Save Nikita" websites and took out
protest ads in Variety, she relented and did eight final episodes to
keep Nikita devotees happy. She had conditions, though.

"I said to the producers, 'I want cash at the end of each episode in my
trailer!'" Wilson says with a laugh. "I felt (Nikita) was a great
experience, but it was really tough on me, but they didn't really take care of
me. If they had they would have let me out to do X Men, they would have
given me a piece of the pie. It was obvious they didn't care."

Being in Canada for much of the Nikita shoot, Wilson was unaware of
the jokes the show was generating in Australia, especially in Melbourne where
every comedian seemed to relish making fun of the myth that Wilson was a model
trying to be an actress.

For the record, she says, she was a model for two years, between the ages of
18 and 20. She did stints in Europe and the US, where she did a Levi's campaign.
"Modelling was a great passport for me," she says. "What a great way to see the
world! I just made money and travelled the country."

After that, and before her Nikita break, she moved to the US and
studied acting seriously with the Los Angeles Actors Circle Theatre and with Tom
Waits at the TomCats repertory group. She was recently offered roles in the
comedy I Spy and the art house film Don't Explain, but had to
turn them down because of her pregnancy.

She proudly boasts about the rave review La Femme Nikita received in
The New York Times. Wilson openly admits, however, that Nikita
wasn't exactly Shakespeare. Churning out an hour of drama in six days left
little time for earnest explorations into the spiritual recesses of the
character's soul.

"With no rehearsals, no read-throughs, one take, maybe two takes per scene,
it was very hard to do," she says, adding a gasp for emphasis. "You just do it.
(As I went on) I became more relaxed and understood that I didn't have to work
so hard. Just do your research and let it go. I gained experience on that. It
was there I learned how to cope and I became more trusting of myself as an
actor."